Amelia watched the direction in which her patronus had disappeared long after she could no longer see its glowing light. It had disappeared among the towers of the castle, and although Amelia would have much preferred to continue looking away from the chaos that was erupting near the gates, she knew that ignorance would not remove what had happened, and eventually her eyes returned to the scene unfolding before her.
Although it shouldn’t have, it felt to Amelia as though she were watching a movie of the event, rather than witnessing it firsthand. Someone had taken the girl’s body down from the gates and laid it on the ground covered with some sort of material, but moments later, the girl’s body was rising of its own accord, and though the words were muffled from this distance, Amelia could make out enough to understand the message. Jack was being her usual foolishly-brave self, arguing with what Amelia quickly understood to be an inferi. She had studied them in Defense Against the Dark Arts, read about them in books. She knew how dangerous they could be, and apparently so did Professor Ambrojze, who was first staff member to arrive on the scene despite Amelia’s direct message to Doyle.
All of this she saw with her own eyes. She had spent hours upon hours in observation over her years at Hogwarts, so much so that she no longer doubted the validity of her own sensory perceptions. She knew what she was seeing and hearing was exactly what was occurring in the reality she inhabited, so why did she still feel like none of it was really happening?
It was happening. It just wasn’t happening to her.
Amelia watched as students began to take comfort in one another, drifting closer to their peers in order to find some kind of solace in one another. Ariel had caught Jack’s hand, and let go only when a younger student approached him. As the older Slytherin boy swung the tiny child into his arms Amelia’s mind acknowledged that she ought to have been touched by this gesture, and surprised that it had come from Ariel, but instead she felt… nothing. Elijah was being swarmed the younger students; even he, a figure of reckless abandon at nearly every other point in his life, was viewed by the other students as someone to lean on at a time like this. Amelia struggled to recognize a short, dark-haired girl in the dim of the night, but eventually identified her as Miseria. She too had younger students flocking to her sides and looking to her for comfort.
And despite the fact that Professor Ambrojze had called attention to her with his directive, Amelia was still standing alone, 100 meters from any other student, and no one was coming toward her. Instead, her housemates were gathering around another older student, and Amelia didn’t bother trying to discern who it was. Some of her housemates were shooting looks over their shoulder at her, standing apart from the crowd in her running shoes and sweat-soaked shirt, but they didn’t come to her for their comfort. They knew better.
Amelia had effectively shut down her emotional system, as she was so apt to do in situations where the pressure to feel was so great. It was why everyone referred to her as robotic and cold; rationally, Amelia knew she ought to be crying in this situation, but it was that same rationale that kept her from doing it. How would her tears be productive? They wouldn’t bring Sage back. They wouldn’t aid in the plans of the staff members now shouting for her to join them.
When the other Ravenclaw student was ushering the last of the house back into the castle, Amelia jogged over to the cluster of faculty and older students that had been asked to stay. Amelia could not help but be hit by a wave of irony as she approached the group, realizing that just this past week the headmaster had asked her to consider helping out with the protection of the school. She had told him she would have to think about it, but she had never thought the time to make a decision would come upon her so quickly.
When she was within earshot, it seemed Elijah had filled in the faculty on what he had seen, which would be much more detailed than what she could supply because of her relative distance to the scene. The headmaster and the charms professor were having a verbal war that seemed to be accomplishing little to nothing, but Amelia kept her thoughts on that matter to herself. She didn’t need to say what she was thinking, however, because Ambrojze said it for her, and she found herself agreeing with what he said even as he walked away from the group, leaving her to stand with Elijah, Ariel, Jack, Wilson, and Doyle, an odd collection if she ever saw one.
“In what capacity can I be of assistance?” Amelia asked point-blank, directing her question to Doyle and avoiding the eyes of all the others. She sounded distant and mechanical in her question, but with no emotion to inject into her words, there was little choice in the matter. Amelia simply wanted, as Damon had appeared to, to put things straight as quickly as possible. The rational solution would be to deal with the situation at hand and to tighten security in tandem, but as a foot soldier of the headmaster’s whims, Amelia kept her mouth shut and waited for marching orders.
by 
